China

Social stability

The case for a heavy hand

EMPLOYEES of some state-owned enterprises are used to being corralled into occasional “political study” sessions to be lectured on the Communist Party’s latest thinking. In recent days, however, such meetings have taken on a highly unusual twist. In several workplaces around the country, the topic of discussion has not been a party directive or an editorial in the official press, but instead an anonymous posting on the internet. The post is an anti-Western diatribe, urging Chinese to draw lessons from the chaos that ensued from the collapse of authoritarian regimes elsewhere. It has been made into an unorthodox tool in an effort by the party’s propagandists to deter calls for democracy.

Also an odd one. The print media did not publish the article in full. Readers were effectively being encouraged by propaganda officials to search for it online. A possible explanation is that although the article is pro-party, it is unusually blunt in associating China’s possible fate with that of authoritarian countries run by widely decried dictators. Propaganda officials may have reckoned that its scaremongering tone (“if ever China is bereft of the leadership of the Communist Party, there will be utter chaos across the nation”) would help their cause. But they also likely wanted to distance themselves a little from the article’s bluntness, including its mention of President Xi’s background as a “princeling”, which is normally a taboo topic, and its explicit praise for him (Chinese media usually try to play down expressions of support for individual leaders).

As Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reports, some internet users in China have attacked the article. Its title has become the butt of jokes. “Without the motherland Bitcoin would be nothing”, He Jiangbing, a financial journalist, tweeted to his more than 95,000 followers on Sina Weibo (speculating in the online currency has become a fad in China). 21ccom.net, a liberal-leaning website, has published several essays criticising the article (eg this one, in Chinese, titled “The Nazis used to howl: ‘Deutschland über alles’”).

But officials appear undeterred. Chinese newspapers have run reports of workplace meetings to discuss the nationalist screed. In the central city of Xiangyang, employees at a railway station have been gushing about it (see here, in Chinese). One recalled seeing an Iraqi athlete, during the London Olympics, describe on television the dangers of training in her turbulent country. “Without a strong country, without peace, their situation today will be ours tomorrow,” the railway worker was quoted as saying. “Only when the motherland is strong and stable can the people be free and happy,” the manager of a local state-owned company in the eastern city of Suqian told his workers on December 6th, at a meeting about the article (here, in Chinese). Staff at the management office of a development zone in the coastal city of Yantai responded with “immediate sympathy” after studying it. Propaganda officials, rarely enthused by anything that goes viral on the internet, are having a field day with this one.

Some people will never miss a chance to demonize China and the Chinese people. Any shortcoming becomes yet another piece of evidence that the Chinese are evil.
.
If you treat the Chinese as enemies you will get what you ask for.

America has its limits on freedom of speech: You can't lie in advertisements, you can't provoke a stampede by shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't threaten other people.
If I want to go into a government owned library and do research on the My Lai massacre, the Trail of Tears, or the NSA spying on Americans, I'm free to do so.
Go to a public library in China and tell me what you find there about the Tiananmen massacre, the Cultural Revolution, or Liu Xiaobo.
That's the difference. It's not that America has limits of its own, it's that the limits China places are self-serving and meant to deceive the Chinese people. If the only limits on free expression in China were to prevent fraud or criminal intimidation, nobody would criticize it.

Yes, it's already happening. The Senkaku ADIZ will no doubt be followed by an ADIZ over the nine-dashed line area of the South China Sea. ASEAN had a meeting in Tokyo today and pledged to "uphold the freedom of travel" through the South China Sea - an oblique slap at China - and China's response was to tell them to mind their own business.

ASEAN cannot outsource it's security to the US indefinately, it should develop a regional military alliance to defend itself from China's territorial ambitions. Failure to do so will mean that China continues it's policy of divide and conquer, a strategy that has already succeeded. Cambodia, recipient of $11.5 billion in Chinese loans, sabotaged the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh by preventing the reading of a final communique calling for a "no first use of force" in the South China Sea. China is like a fox that has broken into the ASEAN chicken coop, and the only thing keeping the chickens from being eaten is the farmer, Uncle Sam.

Get off it. Nobody is demonizing China and the Chinese people - only criticizing the actions of the Chinese State / Communist Party.

And rightly so. The Chinese leadership flirts with nationalism. If it chooses to use anti-foreign nationalism to stay in power, that's a very dangerous development for the rest of the world - and first of all, for the Chinese people.

True, but China doesn't do "gradual periodic reforms", it does cataclysmic revolutions in which whatever dictatorship (emperor, communists) happens to be in charge gets overthrown in an orgy of blood-letting. Search Wikipedia for "rebellions in China" for a list of the 19 revolutions China has experienced so far including the Taiping Rebellion in which 20 million were slaughtered. Then there is Mao who caused the deaths of 40 million some of whom were eaten by their starving brethren. Search Wikipedia for "Cultural Revolution" for more on that shocking topic. Malta has just announced that anyone who gives them 650,000 Euros will get a Maltese passport and the right to live and work anywhere in the EU. Prepare for thousands of PRC nationals flocking to Malta to buy their EU nationality. You just know China is on it's last legs.

Size necessarily brings complexity, and that is the price China has to pay for its size. It is a worthy and necessary trade-off for China and the Chinese. The alternative would be the re-play of its recent history. No doubt a lot of highly educated, intelligent, deep-thinking people outside China wish exactly that for the Chinese.
It is by no means an accident that USA sponsors "patriotism" every bit as feverishly as does China. Both know exactly what they are doing.

to be fair, to call this subject phenomenon ‘This is the result of a co-ordinated propaganda drive ’ is baseless and over sensitive on the part of TE.

If you read in chinese language, you’d literally see hundreds of articles and comments on chinese web sites on any given day that are critical or praising the western system, as well as those critical or praising the government and the ccp party. Such diversity of opinions is freedom of expression enjoyed by chinese netizens of over 450 million.

there are limits and forbidden zone in public expressions in china of course, but name me but one nation who did not have some forbidden zone or taboo in its public expressions----- none.

The freedom of expression and the popularity of a particular article on line and naturally with its large following in the media of all sorts should not be misconstrued as some conspiracy of ‘co-ordinated propaganda drive’ in china. that's not a smart way of bashing it.

This is a bunch of nonsense. You're attempting to justify your country's censorship, and doing a poor job of it. I don't need journalists to make my opinions known. I can rent a billboard and write whatever I want on it. I can make a million leaflets and had them out to pedestrians in major cities. I can start my own newspapers. Or I can simply post online. There is no limitation, beyond the natural restraint of resources.

A colleague of mine is in regular contact with Chinese in China. These are university-educated people. My colleague is scared of what they tell her.
.
Historical facts, for example about the Cultural Revolution, are simply denied. They have been exposed to consistent propaganda for so long and so consistently, they believe it as true. Dissenting books are forbidden and the web is filtered and monitored.
.
And people want history to show that their people, their way, are good. Just like right-wing Americans and Australians are all too happy to believe fossil fuel-funded propaganda about climate science, so many Chinese seem to resist interpretations that are not agreeable.
.
So far, the Chinese leadership has been able to trade off freedom with material wellbeing. But the demographic divident has been cashed and the ratio of working-age people over pensioners and children is worsening. In the environment, the chickens have come home to roost. In many areas, the air is poisonous. Water is ever dirtier and simply scarcer. Double-digit economic growth is ever harder to achieve.
.
What will China's leadership do when they can no longer meet their end of the bargain? How will they deal with increased unrest and dissent? With democracy from the bottom up, or with nationalism and the use of external threats to unite the people and justify the repression?
.
I hope the first, but recent events suggest the latter strategy is a real possibility.

The modernization of China has the capacity to be a positive event of enormous proportions for mankind, in terms of lifting over a billion people from poverty in only a few decades. It also has the potential to cause a catastrophic world war. The global balance of power that has existed since the last world war is disappearing, and the Chinese are not keen to follow international norms established by the US and Russia during the Cold War. With events such as the recent harassment of the USS Cowpens, and the hoopla over relatively small and insignificant islands such as the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, do not give me great confidence that China will be a benevolent world power. I'm concerned for the future.

There is a difference between right and wrong; some of the things, for example, that the Chinese government has done and still does have been and are iniquitous. Criticizing the Chinese Communist Party does not make one anti-Chinese. The only person in the Deng Xiaoping era to be the vilified subject of a nationwide criticism campaign was the writer Bai Hua, who argued that patriotism and loving the Communist Party need not be the same thing. The point should not require making. Totalitarian systems, even when they are starting to break down, always insist that there is a perfect and comprehensive symmetry between the national interest and that of the system; country and party become ideologically interchangeable. No one else should be obliged to sign up to this insulting, demeaning nonsense. I greatly admire Chinese culture and many of China's achievements- including the 1980s opening of the economy; I have many Chinese friends and several Chinese heroes. But I do not admire or look up to the Chinese Communist Party, any more than of old I admired the Soviet Communist Party.

Westerners are brainwashed to believe they have freedom of speech, actually it is free press, here is the difference between free press and free speech, and you can see that China has less free press but more freedom of speech, because in China, voices against top 1% are aware by public. In "free" world, voices against top 1% are tightly controlled and suppressed.

(1) The essence of freedom of speech is about letting public beware your opinions, this is where free press and freedom of speech differ.

If a journalist has an opinion on an issue, he can make public aware of it, especially those anchors, their opinions can shape how millions of people think. On the other hand, if you have an opinion, you can't make public listen to you unless media and journalists like it.

(2) To have meaningful opinions, you must not be misled or manipulated. So you must have knowledge on pro and con of the issue you want to talk about.

Because most people get most of their information from TV and Newspaper, media and journalists can control what public are aware of. They will present the pro if they like it, they will present you the con if they don't like it. In this way they can shape your opinions about certain issues, so you will say what they want you to say.

(3) When government controls TV and Newspaper, they control which part of issues open to public, pro or con; they can suppress opinions they don't like. Unlike 40, 50 years ago when they blocked the information, now they don't block all complains, but keep such opinions away from public's attention.

(4) "free" media, means that media and journalists control TV and Newspaper; control which part of issues open to public, pro or con (free from punishment if misleading and manipulating); control what issues will get public attention. Simply speaking, let them control public opinions and information.

ayh the difference.
.
as for freedom of expressions, I'm not saying china is any better, or worse than the us.
.
but there lies the difference:
.
take cultural revolution, horror stories about it are all over in china's media (and libraries I presume), but TAM and Liu xiaobo, as told in the west, are a bunch of lies doctored by people with hidden agenda.
.
take mylai, there were undeniable vivid videos and photos of the massacre and of course you can find in libraries. but what about agent orange spewed over almost a quarter of Vietnam and its dreadful after effects are still killing people there and deforming at least half a million of Vietnamese new born babies so far? what about the us 'mercy' flights airlifting some 3,000 vn children affected were actually a cover to withdraw special us personnel out of vn during the us retreat there (according to us veterans who served in Vietnam war while revisiting there decades later)?
.
I am not criticizing the us per se, it's a great country despite of all faults cited, but your comment appears to be so, so brainwashed. that's indeed the difference.

The more authoritarian measures they enact to put off their collapse, the faster they will actually collapse as the government loses what legitimacy it has left with the people. Crackdowns do not ensure stability; they just delay change with fear while making the movement more powerful when the issue comes up again (as is sure to happen unless you just genocide your own people).

Even if they try to continue the status quo, they will stop growing economically if they don't reform politically in ways similar to how the Western democracies did. The outcome is inevitable so long as they allow growth to happen: You can't have an authoritarian regime running a truly diverse economy. There are just too many different powerful interests that power needs to be shared with for it to work, and there is no way for central planning to be an effective way of managing such an economy given it's growing complex web of relationships that are best handled by people who are intimately familiar with what they're doing and what is best for them.

They might follow a different transition to democracy than other countries have (through gradual, periodic reforms, seems like)but eventually I think they'll wind up looking much like a democracy because they have to.

The Communists have a somewhat tenuous grasp on the population already, given that they've abandoned much of their ideology for pragmatism. They aren't really Communists anymore so what justifies this level of government control? They are only hanging onto power because they are growing economically and they know it, thus their complete focus on providing "stability".

They are playing a dangerous game if they go back to their old way of doing things. It's just going to push people over the edge against them.

Western liberal democracies have proven themselves the most stable, peaceful and prosperous form of government in history. The ability to hash out political differences non-violently does wonders to reduce the incidence of successions crises and political violence.

Also, as an American of Chinese descent, I strongly disagree with your contention that I'm nothing more than a servant. I'm certainly better paid and have more freedom's than the drone whose job it is to troll western news site's comment sections.

god saves the queen (or the king, or the country), but your logic does not hold water!

nobody elected the queen or king, but s/he is accepted as the reining ruler or representation of countries like uk or swaziland. if loving the monarch and loving the country can be the same, why loving the ruling party and loving countries like china must be different?

and tell me, if anti-queen is necessarily anti-UK, why anti-ccp party is not necessarily anti-china?

"I wonder what China would be like if it didn't have ideological one-party rule that is employing nationalism to stay in power but an open society like Taiwan's?"

I will die a happy man if China can be like Taiwan. Some people in Taiwan may get offended but I always think that Chinese people should be proud of Taiwan becoming a thriving democratic society, the first in China's long history.

"I ultimately trust in China's wisdom. But does everyone else?"

Deep down I am worried. Traditionally the Chinese people are satisfied with mistreating their own people but they have a chip on their collective shoulder this time around. What we are going to see down the road depends on how China and the US can manage a difficult relationship.

The Great Centralized Meddle Kingdumm is strong (with reverse-engineered stealth fighters and Dongfeng 21D's), all-knowing and wise, propelled by the strength of 1.5 billion loyal hands (including those that now live in Toronto, Mandalay, Vancouver, Lhasa, San Francisco, Khotan, New York, Singapore, Bangkok, Hanoi, Manila etc.), all pulling together as one under the Great Celestial Bureaucracy high above the Tian Shan mountains (or is it Tiananmen square?). The Great Economic Leapfrog Forward (GDP growth of 10% come hell or high water, smog or sandstorms, bursting water melons or dead pigs in the rivers) guided by the Ancient Confuscion Wisdom of the Communo-capitalistic Party of China is unstoppable. The Communist Party of China is the core of leadership for the rise of nepotism and patronage with Chinese characteristics and represents the development trend of China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced pheromonic culture and the fundamental needs of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The Communist Party of China takes Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong's Hukuo=Proletariat, Deng Xiaoping's Two Cats on Slippery Stones Theory, the irrelevant thought of Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development towards a moderately prosperous Chinese Dream as its guide to action.
The West should be happy that the hard-working industrious Chinese provide all these beautiful Christmas consumer goodies at affordable prices (available at WalMart, Wall Street and other respectable stores), not to mention all these ubiquitous talented graduate students (with high PISA scores) for corrupt Western institutions of colonial learning (such as Harvard and Stanford).
'tis the season of peace, love and joy, so let's be jolly and celebrate Mao's 120th and Jesus' 2013th(?) birthday together
“Mao+Jesus shengdanjie”